Published: April 7, 2026 at 7:30 am
Distology founder and CEO Hayley Roberts told The Naked Founder podcast about the personal cost her divorce had on her and her business
Professionally, she founded specialist IT cybersecurity distributor Distology in 2015, growing turnover to £63m, with 50 staff and offices in the UK, Netherlands and Germany.
Numerous awards followed and the proud mother of three grown-up children forged a reputation as one of the most respected voices in the industry.
Then she got divorced, and everything changed.
Roberts is one of a growing number of female founders to get divorced and has opened up about her experiences in the latest episode of The Naked Founder podcast.
She said: “I’ve changed a huge amount through my 20s, 30s, 40s that I think you start on a road of wanting to achieve something and be with somebody forever.
“But forever is actually a really long time nowadays. I think that what happens is we change the path in which we take, we change the desires we have, we change the goals that we have.
“I think you either evolve together or you evolve apart. And it’s a bit like somebody explained it to me once. It was like one degree of separation so you’re on a railway track.
“You don’t notice a change of one degree straight away but as you go further down the track, that one degree gets wider and wider. I think you suddenly just look and go, ‘I don’t know whether I want this anymore’. It’s a horrible thing to go through.”